


A world without hope

by Scarlet_Angel_13



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Apollo is sad, Apollo needed a hug, Hope, Love, Male-Female Friendship, Tragedy, Zeus helped for once, angsty apollo, god and mortal friendship, he got one, kind of, then messed it up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-11-06 08:32:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17936384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scarlet_Angel_13/pseuds/Scarlet_Angel_13
Summary: The world grew up and left the gods behind. Most of them forgave and moved one, helping where they could, but Apollo grew to hate them. What will it take for such a melancholy god to regain his hope in humanity? And perhaps he would find it in the most unlikely of places...





	A world without hope

Apollo had never had much luck with love. He tried for centuries to attain the fickle fallacy of love. Of course, he had his fair share of lovers and trysts, but he had always yearned for more. Yearned for someone who would understand his wholly and fully as others once had. But eventually he had given up in his search for love. He threw the idea of it so the wind and never stayed long with any mortal or god after he had gotten what he had desired from them. He became vicious and ruthless to those who flaunted their love before him. There were days when his anger over took him and he scorched the earth and the people who resided there, capturing the winds and forcing them not to alleviate him punishments. He inflicted plague and disease out of boredom and seethed when the mortals fund his cures. 

His muses tried to appease him by gifting mortals with song and hope, but even the deaf pianist could not please their once shinning lord. He struck down men and women alike and when they forgot him he raged. He raged when they no longer travelled to his temples, he screamed when they claimed that his gifts were simply things that they discovered on their own, calling it science. When they killed his precious creatures and domesticated him Wolves, turning them into pathetic begging beasts. He wept when they no longer sang to him in praise, when they forgot about all he had done for them. But he did not weep alone. 

Their creations were killing the world they so carefully crafted. And the wilds were receding faster than they could be restored. It was often that the bitter god held his twin as more of her land was tarnished and violated by the mortals who had claimed it theirs. Poseidon’s oceans were filled with waste and it was killing his people. The Mer-folk had retreated into the deepest undiscovered parts of the ocean where the humans could not survive or explore. Their world was torn by war that even Ares scorned because it had lost all honour. Athena screamed at the masses when they shunned women and refused them their equality and education. When they killed, raped and beat their own over race, or sexuality, none of which they had cared about when their people still knew them. 

The so called great wars were nothing but meaningless slaughter of innocence and art. And the world never recovered from it. They fought battles of pointless hatred, they belittled and shunned people for their race and beliefs. People who still believed in the old ways, even if it wasn’t their ways, were demonised and curse by those who did not understand. Those people, who believed, help give the gods hope. Helped some return to the lost sheep and protect them from those who would harm them. Ares would try to protect the innocent children who were attacked in the streets or in their schools, but rarely could he prevent the deaths of those who did not deserve to be cut down. Artemis abandoned her woodlands for the concrete jungles mortals had built for themselves and hunted a new kind of animal, who prayed on the unsuspecting innocents on the streets. But the people did not see them as glorious or godly. They forgot even after they had laid eyes upon the divine.

Apollo hated it. He hated how people hurt themselves and the world around them. So, he punished them. More diseases, more complex and more lethal than before. He burned the earth and took the water, he killed the crops and took back his oracle. No one cared for him anymore, no one prayed, and no one rejoiced in song to them. The rejoiced to their idol who had abandoned them all. He would have already destroyed them all, but every now and then there was a small shinning beacon that stopped him. He saw people who suffered and asked only to see the sun one last time before they passed. The people who would sit on their own and talk to the sky on the summer days where he was fiercest, who would smile and wait between their tales or simple musings as if waiting for him to reply. He never did but they still smiled. There were the children named for him still, who craved his light from the moment they were born to the moment they understood what social norms were. Before they would have been his favoured, perhaps even his blessed, but now society ruined them so thoroughly that they turned their backs to him. And then there was the shinning beacons of society they would address the gods by name in hopes that there was someone in the world who understood their hatred and desires of peace. Of course, they were not the only ones who scorned the mortals who had forgotten them, for there were many gods that the world shunned and forgot. The Norse, Egyptian, Celtic, Aztec… the list went on. Apollo had once heard Forseti, Norse god of justice, muse about letting Loki loose on the humans. Apollo sometimes used about letting the titan’s see what their retched creations had done to their mother’s land. Not that he would ever let Zeus know of course. Hi father would cast him out if he ever mentioned it. 

But bitter was all Apollo knew in centuries that past, until people stopped caring about any god. An age of the Secular thinkers. How pitiful. How disdainful. How pathetic.

“They care for us anymore,” he mused during one of the rare Olympian council meetings. “So why should we care for them. Let them die away like the beast they are.” Artemis agreed with his sentiment.

“They may not care about you, but they care about me,” Aphrodite shot back petulantly. 

“Love. Who cares about such a pathetic thing.” The council was quiet as Apollo spoke in such contempt that even Ares had flinched. Finally, Zeus had had enough of his son’s bitter hatred. With a heavy heart he raised his hand and cast the god of the sun to earth. Mortal in body but with his memory intact. He would remember them, but a curse be one him. He could not talk about them to mortals, unless the mortals started it. He was given an identity, a life to call his own, and an education. He was even in attendance at a university. Forced to study a subject he had lived through. History. 

He fumed as raged to himself as he sat himself in a seat in the lecture hall and scowled at anyone who wished to sit with him. He may not be a god any longer, but he was still a handsome man. It seemed to work, until a girl sat in his row. There were two seats between them, but she was still too close. Thankfully, she didn’t speak to him. She didn’t speak to anyone who sat close to them. It was a little odd. Everyone else seemed to be talking, or on their phones (Their equivalent to instant letters) talking to people in other places. But she just sat with a notebook, a pen and a book. It wasn’t a textbook. No, it was a fiction. Fiction that even he had once heard of. 

“That book…” the girl looked over to him her gaze turned to her book. “My sister mentioned it once. I never did get around to reading it. Is it good?” The girl looked at him as if he was mad, before she smiled and picked it up from the desk. 

“It’s a good book. You can get a copy at the book shop in the thistle. I’m not that far in yet but it is in interesting take on the old gods.” The girl seemed to like having someone to talk to about the subject. Luck was smiling on him. She had to be. This was just too good to be real. 

“Which old gods? There are many,” He said. The girl smiled mischievously at him and turned back to her note book to doodle.

“All of them,” she said idly before the lecturer arrived and started the class. It was odd. Being condemned to learn what he had witnessed first-hand from a second-hand perspective. But the lecturer made it interesting. Different views on different figures. Freedom fighter or terrorist. It was interesting to listen and see things he had never bothered to look at before. It seemed to intrigue the girl beside him. An hour later saw them leaving the lecture theatre with the girl smiling and talking away to him about the class. She was… odd. She was quiet and reserved when he spoke, even ending her own tale if he interrupted her. other times she spoke with so much zeal and passion that he couldn’t help bit listen to what she said without interruption. Sometimes she would arrive early to lectures and claim a seat in the very back row by the wall, others she arrived after others and sat by him. It was odd. She was odd.

didn’t really mind her oddness. It was better than plainness. And she had spoken once of myths she enjoyed. Some were Norse, one or two were Celtic in origin, but her favourites were Greek myths. He already knew their myths, he had lived them… well he had lived a version of those events. 

It was funny though. He listened as she told the old stories, and then as she sassed and reprimanded the gods and goddesses who had done wrong. It was entertaining to hear her thought on Zeus and Poseidon, on Aphrodite and Athena. They talked a lot. Apollo spoke of history and its consequences. The girl spoke of History and its achievements. They differed on opinions far too often to agree on the subject, but the girl still liked him well enough. 

He was funny, polite, sensitive. But he was also sarcastic, cruel and uncaring. 

“You’re odd you know,” she told him. He looked at her with confusion and asked her why.

“You’re just… contradictory. You hate the subject you study, you hate everything its made, but you love music, art, poetry and medicine. Things we would never have if it weren’t for history. Or, well, we wouldn’t remember them if it weren’t for history. For example, the cure for the bubonic plague has been lost at least twice. Music has changed and evolved but still stayed the same. Medicine has improved in leaps and bounds because people research and work and try to make things better. Art evolves with culture which moves with the what happens to a society. Poetry I will grant is definitely something that the poets of the past did better. But still, I suppose you’re alright, for someone so odd.” 

“I’m not odd. You are,” he shot back. She just huffed a laugh and kept walking. She enjoyed his company. Apollo would even call her a friend.

It scared him.

Apollo had not considered a moral his friend for over two millennia. For a girl, whose name would slip his tongue in the years to come, long after she was dead and buried, to be called friend. The others must be laughing upon Olympus at how much one year amongst morals had changed him. Before he would never have hung upon the words of a mortal, but now he would willingly stay silent to hear tales he had heard a thousand times before. Just so his friend would be happy. And it did make her happy to tell him all about them and the gods. Even about himself. She enjoyed his myths. She liked his passion, how he loved without bounds, how she mourned or him and his lovers who met ill fates. She scorned Eros for his temper and Zephyr for his rage and jealousy. It was endearing. 

And it terrified him. 

He…enjoyed being human, as long as he had her by her side. He knew he would leave her. He would serve his punishment and be done with it. But now he didn’t want to be done.

He spent four years with her. They studied together. They laughed together. They cried together. There were the closest friends. In their last year they both knuckled down to write their dissertation’s. It was tiresome, boring and tedious. But they did it, and they graduated. 

Once it was done, they celebrated with others. They drank and sang and danced the night away, and when the dancing and singing and drinking was through, they fell into bed together. By morning they were both far too embarrassed to talk about it. They spent a week a part, until they decided not to care. They would spend days when they weren’t working together, talking about everything they had been through together. Four years had seemed like an eternity, until it was over, and they were looking back on it. Apollo didn’t really know how old he was in his human form, but the girl was twenty-two. He knew that much about her, and so much more. She had been young when they met, only eighteen, small and bookish but more willing to read her fantasies than the facts she needed for he classes. He made sure she did once he realised her habit. He studied with her and kept her on track, and in return she showed him the joys of humanity. She even enjoyed his poetry. And for each poem and song he had, she matched it with one of her own. She never wrote them, but she knew them from heart. She sang one very often.

‘O’ My love is like a red, red rose  
That’s newly sprung in June  
O’ My luve is like the melodie  
That’s sweetly play’d in tune  
As fair art thou, my bonnie lad  
So deep in luve am I  
And I will luve thee still my love  
Till a’ the sea’s gang dry.  
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear  
And the rock melts wi’ the sun  
I will luve thee still, my dear  
While the sands o’ life shall run  
And fare thee well, my only love  
And fare thee well, a while  
And I will come again, my live  
Tho’ it were ten thousand miles.’

It was a sweet song. One written by someone from years before. A poet from her homeland. She knew others. Some harder to understand than others. But he liked them, she took such pride in them. 

“Home is always important to remember, no matter how far from it we may be, we will always have somewhere to call our home.” 

She always had some odd little form of wisdom. Most of them centred around Family and home. As simple as they were, they helped him understand why his words upset others on Olympus. Family was important to the girl. Even when they fought, she apologised. Even when they warred against each other she forgave them and was forgiven in return.

He took her words to heart. A heart he had long forgotten had existed. It beat in his chest with vigour and he remembered how he had once been. He had been a being who loved as much as he hated. He was the burning sun, but he was also the soothing remedy for the sick, the beautiful sounds of music that soothed and comforted the lonely souls. He was more than just death and destruction. He was hope, prosperity, peace and enjoyment. 

Graduation passed eventually, and with it the girl returned to her home. Apollo had planned to go with her, but he could not.

He hadn’t told her that he planned to follow her back, to stay by her side for as long as he could. But his father had decided that his lesson had been learned. He had raged when it had happened. He had fallen asleep in his bed, in his own flat, and awoken in his be on Olympus. Confused. Shocked. Heartbroken. He hadn’t even gotten to sat good bye.

“Just another tragedy of Phoebus Apollo,” Dionysus had mused over a glass of wine. Apollo had glared at him and continued to tune his lyre. It had been too long since he played it and it had fallen into disrepair in his absence. 

“Not quite. She isn’t dead. She’ll live a long and happy life. I just won’t be there with her.” 

Artemis had tried to argue that he could go back. He had walked among mortals before, he could do so again if he so wished. Apollo had denied her. Nothing good ever came from him messing in mortal’s lives. They all ended up dead. He made his mistakes with his past, he would help spare her from a retched future. 

Apollo had learned his lesson from the mortal.

He could love. 

But it was best that he only love from a distance. 

For their own protection. 

And for his hearts own safety.

**Author's Note:**

> I dont own the Greek gods (A little obvious but you never know), I also dont own the song Red, Red rose. Red, Red rose was written by and belongs to Robert Burns, a Scottish poet from the eighteenth century. However, I do own my plot. I hope you enjoyed this little mind bunny and I hope you have a wonderful day.
> 
> -Scarlet xx


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